Jump Force Is a Promising All-Star Anime Crossover with a Lame E3 Showing

Jump Force is not the first time the worlds of Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Naruto have crossed over in video game form. Seeing as its announcement comes on the 50th anniversary of Weekly Shonen Jump -- the weekly shonen manga anthology that houses each of those series -- Jump Force feels like it was designed to be a little extra special, even if its poorly tuned E3 demo seemed like it was designed to hold it back.

Mechanically, Jump Force will feel very familiar to those who have played the Tenkaichi games. In the 3-on-3 tag fighting game, the camera is always set behind your character and locked on to your opponent -- it never breaks away. You’re able to use high speed dashes to get in close very fast, perform quick side-to-side dodges to avoid incoming attacks and reposition, and block right before an attack to teleport behind your opponent.

Exit Theatre Mode

Combos require some mashing. You can pretty much just continuously press one of the attack buttons, and hold up, down, or nothing to change what type of combo you use. You can also hold down an attack button to charge up a smash attack, which will absorb enemy hits to deliver your own single powerful strike.

While the combat system is very simplistic in nature, it does feel like some consideration went into developing for deeper play. Players can tag their partners on a pretty short cooldown to extend combos and deal big damage, for instance. Throws and fully charged smash attacks can punish those who try to block everything, and players must also be mindful of their meter that governs their three main special moves.

As it stands, Jump Force isn’t anywhere near the level of depth or complexity as a game like Dragon Ball FighterZ, but it at least feels like there’s enough here that will separate those who take the time to learn the mechanics against those who just mash on the attack button.

One interesting departure for Jump Force is that while it is a 3-on-3 tag fighting game, all of your team shares one health bar, and there’s no regaining life by tagging in a new character, which means you really only need to tag in your partners for tag assist combos. You can’t choose which member to tag in, either; the order you choose your team dictates the order you tag them in once you’re in a match. This decision meant matches played out a little too quickly for my taste, but without an actual human to fight against, it was hard to really get a natural feel for it.

That brings me to the biggest problem of the E3 demo: the E3 demo itself. For some reason, Bandai Namco limited E3 attendees to only fighting against brain-dead, easy AI that essentially would just stand there and wait for you to hit them. There was no difficulty selection or ability to fight against other people -- just a practice dummy that would randomly wake up, do a combo, then go back to sleep. It’s extremely important in a fighting game to be able to react to whatever your opponent does, and when your opponent does practically nothing, it leaves half the game in question.

That’s why even after 45 minutes of playtime with Jump Force, it’s hard to say how an actual match would play out. Based on what I know of the mechanics, I can only speculate on that. There’s a comeback mechanic called “Awakening,” for example, that requires you to get beat up in order to fill up a separate meter. But I can’t really tell you much about how it affects matches because I would have to literally put the controller down for a minute or two to allow the lazy AI opponent to hit me enough to charge that meter.

But a poor E3 showing isn’t necessarily reflective of Jump Force as a whole. The game looks stunning. Great visual effects make every hit feel impactful, and a unique visual style combines realistic environments with stylized character models that remain faithful to their source material. Not much was revealed about the story mode outside of the fact that Light and Ryuk from Death Note -- who appeared at the end of the trailer -- will be key characters, even if they’re not playable in the game.

We’ll find out more in the coming months, as Jump Forces is scheduled for a release on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC in 2019.

Mitchell Saltzman is IGN's Livestream Producer and thinks Luffy is the greatest shonen anime protagonist of all time. Find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit